Discoveries like this provide a more unseemly level of encouragement to me than they would for an artist less insecure and needy than I. But what the hell? I take life’s little pleasures where I can find them.

Thanks to the friend who alerted me to this mention of me and my book in the January 26 installment of David Byrne’s blog. And thank you, too, Mr. Byrne. You show great promise yourself.

Last week I wrote about my recording session for an adaptation that may or may not ever happen of The Swimmer With a Rope In His Teeth. Now I want to belatedly take note of the passing last April of the woman from whose imagination the book’s title character sprang.

I’m embarrassed to acknowledge that I didn’t post anything about Jeanne Shaffer’s death at the time I learned about it. I’m terrible at composing quickie obits when friends depart, and in the case of Doc Shaffer, her achievements merit better-rounded tributes that I can provide by folks who knew her better than I ever did.

Jeanne and I may have produced a book together, but our actual face-to-face visits were limited to maybe half-a-dozen. The visits we did have were sprinkled across a span of decades, the first of them occurring while I was an undergraduate drama-speech major at Birmingham-Southern College forty years ago.

1967, specifically. Jeanne, a composer and educator whose professional home base was at Huntington College in nearby Montgomery, envisioned an opera based on an allegory she had dreamed up about a swimmer who undertakes the rescue of an entire population of miserable people. Itching to start coming up with music for it, Jeanne was scouting for a librettist she could team up with.

Someone who knew that I was an aspiring playwright told her I might be interested in having a go at it. Ignoring the fact that I was a 23-year-old greenhorn, she chased me down and pitched the project.

I loved Jeanne’s story and spent a few months trying to nail down a proper approach. But although she was unfailingly encouraging throughout that period, I soon realized that I was in over my head. Just because I had written a few student plays and had listened to every musical comedy cast album in the Birmingham Public Library record collection didn’t automatically confer mastery of the opera libretto form. Chastened by my clear inadequacy, I begged off, and Jeanne graciously freed me from my commitment.

That could have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. Fifteen years later I popped back into Jeanne Shaffer’s life full of excitement about an entirely different way to tell her story. Our heroic swimmer, I told her, could be the protagonist not of an opera but of a comic book story. A story told with silhouettes.

(Why silhouettes? Maybe I’ll get into that another time; this blog entry is about Jeanne Shaffer.)

Now some practitioners of the "fine arts" (and Jeanne’s many musical compositions certainly placed her within those circles) might have looked down their noses at the comics form had they been approached with such an impertinent suggestion. But Jeanne had an adventurous streak and was unburdened by artistic snobbery. She was instantly intrigued by the radical recasting of her idea that I was proposing. Soon she was a certified enthusiast, and her enthusiasm persisted through the more than twenty additional years it took me to complete my adaptation, which mutated early on from a comic book story into a stand-alone book.

If Jeanne had been a more controlling storyteller she might have kept me on a tighter leash as I added my own touches to her fable and revved up its level of satire. But she rolled with the punches, paying me the compliment of trusting me to pretty much have my way with her tale.

Our only creative disagreement during Swimmer’s germination was resolved almost as soon as it appeared. Between the time of her story’s first telling in 1967 and my re-entry into her life in the mid-’80s, Jeanne’s natural generosity of spirit had led her to attach a slightly more hopeful conclusion to her story. I urged her to reconsider. I wanted to confront readers uncompromisingly with her tale’s darker implications and make them deal with it. Our title character may have been propelled by merciful impulses, I acknowledged, but the book itself needed to be merciless.

Mercilessness doesn’t come easily to gracious southern women, but Jeanne saw my point and let me restore her fable’s original ending.

You’d think that our decades-long marathon of creative cooperation and mutual appreciation would have left me more familiar with all aspects of Jeanne Shaffer’s life and personality than it did. Fact is: the ins and outs of Swimmer dominated most of our conversations, whether in person or on the phone. Anything else I’ve learned about her very interesting life history has been absorbed in chance fragments and on the fly.

I did learn that she was a former child actress in the movies. How cool is that? (As "Jeanne Ellis" she played Jeanette MacDonald’s childhood self in Girl of the Golden West.) She toured for five years with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra beginning when she was eleven — an unusual entry to find in the résumé of a cultured Montgomery Episcopalian, I would say — and I learned just now from her entry in the online listing Classical Composers that she sang with Grace Moore on the Lux Radio Theater. (Hey, my brother and I used to lie awake at night listening to the Lux Radio Theater in Springville during the ’50s. I gather we were twenty years too late to catch one of Jeanne’s performances, unfortunately.)

Jeanne enjoyed a 35-year career as an educator and for thirteen years headed the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Huntington. And long after her Lux days she became a radio personality again via the Southeastern Public Radio Network, hosting a weekly program on women’s music called Eine Kleine Frauenmusik.

Years ago I asked Jeanne if recordings of her music existed and she directed me to a CD of organ performances by Frances Norbert called Music She Wrote: Organ compositions by Women , which includes selections composed by Jeanne along with the work of others (most of it downloadable from the link above). I’m listening to her contributions to that CD as I write this.

I gather that late in her career Jeanne must have played an important cheerleading role for female composers through her web site WomensMusic.com — a site that Google apparently thinks is still alive but that I’ve had no luck accessing this week, which makes me think it did not survive its founder. (If you have better luck than I did, let me know.)

It doesn’t surprise me that teaching, mentoring, and helping other creative people was a strain that ran through the long, productive life that Jeanne led, since even though I personally experienced only a small sampling of her many facets, being giving was the tack she reflexively took with me. Who was I, anyway? An openly gay cartoonist who had gained his chops in underground comix whom she had previously experienced only as a green college-age playwriting wannabe who couldn’t get his act together, materializing out of nowhere after a decade-and-a-half of non-contact to announce that Hey, you oughta be in comics!

"OK," she said. "Put me in comics."

She continued her pattern of givingness by allowing me a huge degree of creative latitude as I expanded and reshaped her story into something very different in its details from the one she first imagined, but one that still had the same concerns about human folly that she had originally invested it with. At least I hope it did. Jeanne never hinted that it didn’t.

The Swimmer lady is gone now, and I’ll never get a chance to ask her what Jeanette MacDonald was really like. But we came away from our three decades of glancing interactions with a book to show for it that has both of our names on the cover.

How cool is that?!

Lending his technical expertise to this endeavor was my pal Jason Brown (below), a multi-talented audio whiz and entrepreneur who with his wife (and my friend from college days) Nicky Heron Brown produces audio books from their home studio in south Berkshire County. Their finished products are marketed through Jason’s BMA Audio web site.

No, what I’m toying with is a (very) limited-animation version of the allegory using Adobe Flash. The notion of creating such a version of Swimmer has long appealed to me despite the fact that I have virtually no spare time to work on it.

In other words, it’s a presently unfunded bit of digital hobbyism that may never see completion or reach an audience. But even so, Jason is generously helping me create a preliminary soundtrack for it. Thanks to him, I may be able to move my experiment along a step or two further when time does permit. (Maybe I can get a grant or something.)

Writing about my projected reworking of this fable makes me want to say a few words, albeit belatedly, about the passing of Doc Shaffer last April, which I failed to note at the time because, well, I don’t find it easy to whip up comments about such losses on short notice.

It seems best, though, to reserve those relections for a separate blog entry, which I hopefully will find time to compose later this week.

While admiration for a job well done is appropriate, the cartoonists among us will inevitably be tempted to do our own inelegant riff on the painting should an opportunity present itself — as exemplified by Laura Weinstein’s promotional graphic (at right above) for Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel, the exhibition of comics art that opened on November 10 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

To be fair, snobbery hasn’t always been the culprit. Sometimes it’s just been habits of thought. Various of my perfectly open-minded art-loving friends acknowledge that they’ve never felt called upon to give much thought to Rockwell, thus allowing the widespread condescension toward the man’s accomplishments to go unexamined in their minds. One can’t keep up with everything, after all, and the need to worry about George W. Bush’s presidency has more urgency, perhaps, than any need to reevaluate the artistic legacy of a popular illustrator who, it must be said, never suffered from disdain among everyday folks.

Maybe I’ve got a personal agenda at play here. As the target of much (to my mind undeserved) condescension during my Barefootz years, I’ve always felt an affinity for the underrated Norman Rockwell. We schoolyard outcasts have to stick together.

Fortunately, time seems to be rendering a fairer verdict about Rockwell than have some art critics in the past. Decide for yourself. For sheer pleasure in looking at richly imagined pictures that have interesting stories to tell, the Rockwell Museum is the place to beat. And the Museum is assembling a big Rockwell exhibition that’ll soon be touring around the country as well, so original Rockwell paintings may not be as out of reach as you think, even for people who can’t make the drive to western Massachusetts.

I view the man as a master visual storyteller who knew how to portray characters that made ordinariness fascinating. Cynics may bristle at the unabashed "neighborliness" of those images and personalities made famous in the course of the artist’s long partnership with the SatEvePost, but those of us who like telling stories with pictures and aspire to do it well know when we’re seeing a fellow cartoonist in action.

Even if Rockwell’s stories were told on canvases instead of comic book pages, the man was clearly playing in our ballpark.

As was true when JM#1 hit bookstore shelves a couple of years ago and CNW brought together a panel to celebrate the occasion, WGBH Forum Network was on hand to videotape the proceedings. The newest recording will ultimately be posted on the WGBH web site (keep your eye on this spot for that); meanwhile, if you’d like to see the video of Jen, me, and Joan Hilty doing similar panel duty back in 2005, here’s where to find that little archival gem.

Typically, thanks to the usual crush of professional tasks that persist in preventing me from making blogging the core of my existence, it’s taken me a full ten days to post photos taken during this most recent Cambridge gabfest. But better later than never; here are a couple of the many images snapped by Jen’s beloved lovergirl and occasional photographic documentarian Emmalee Aliquo. (Not being a media whore like the rest of us, Emmalee has no web presence that Google or I could find; hence her name bears no hyperlink. But take my word for it, Emmalee is one cool chick and you should get to know her sometime.)

Tucked in among our audience, by the way, were two distinguished theatrical personages from the Boston area, Ed and Charlotte Peed, who just happen to be old college-era friends of mine on whom I hadn’t laid eyes in many a long year. Much fun was had as we lunched and caught up on our lives for a couple of hours before the panel began.

I got to observe Ed’s skills at close range in a play or two, though. Especially memorable was listening to him and occasionally viewing him in action from the vantage point of the garbage can I occupied throughout BSC’s 1967 production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Since I only popped into view a time or two during the play, otherwise snuggling in darkness amid mentholated cough syrup fumes (I got sick during the show’s run), I mostly experienced the auditory rather than visual aspects of Ed’s performance as Hamm. But I could tell, even from the odoriferous blackness of my trash container, that his performance was holding the audience rapt throughout the evening.

My dramatic high point in the show was getting to fearlessly eat a Milkbone dog biscuit as onlookers gasped. It comes with the territory if you’re going to play poor, legless, garbage-can-dwelling Nagg in Beckett’s black comedy of desolation, hiring a stunt eater being frowned upon in the world of serious theatre. Ed, who was cast in a more prominent role than mine, ruled the stage as a magnificently throne-bound Hamm. And in case you’ve never tried them yourself, I’ll spare you the trouble: Milkbones, while not actually tasting "good," aren’t quite as unpleasant to the taste buds of a non-dog as one might expect.

I don’t seem to have a photo of Ed in his Hamm role, unfortunately, but I do harbor a yellowing photo (see below) of him portraying one of the four somewhat spooky young men who spent two hours giving a fellow named Manchester Wintergrey the jitters in my 1967 Playwright’s Lab play The Sixth Story.

It’s a clear sign of advancing age when you respond to images of yourself recorded when you were forty with a rueful shake of your head accompanied by the unvoiced question: Who IS that child?

Crumb and S. Clay Wilson being unavailable, it fell to me, a one-time flower-powered longhair who by 1984 had discovered the convenience of a shorter trim, to acquaint a mainstream television audience with what we dope-smoking, acid-tripping counterculture cartoonists of yore had brought forth once we applied our comix-creating impulses to the dispensation of outrageous sexual fantasies, religious transgression, political belligerence and, in my case, cockroach-infested parables on cosmic matters—all in "easy-to-read comic book form."

The interview I’m talking about was one installment of twelve that were broadcast as a series under the umbrella title Funny Business: The Art in Cartooning. All episodes in the series concentrated on one aspect or another of cartooning. (WDCN subsequently syndicated the series to interested PBS stations across America.)

Veteran gag cartoonist and cartooning educator John R. Cassady (known to his friends as "Jack" or "Cass"), was the creator and host of the series. Cass and I had met shortly after my 1977 move to New York during gatherings of the now-defunct Cartoonists Guild.

Funny Business was seen widely enough in its day to generate fan mail from cartooning enthusiasts in various cities, but it never achieved a high enough profile to be a viable candidate for contemporary commercial re-release in DVD format. But that hasn’t stopped Cass from recently burning DVDs of individual episodes on his own for sale on his web site. I was made pleasantly aware of this welcome development when a jewel case through whose plastic cover my unlined face was peering arrived in my Massachusetts mailbox, courtesy of my longtime colleague and pal.

But having been propelled anew into the past by this artifact from my mid-career youth, when some interesting things had happened already but many even more interesting events still lay ahead, I find nostalgia trumping vanity. It was a fun day in Nashville, one during which I got to shmooze with the great New Yorker cartoonist George Booth, whose Funny Business segment was to be taped the same day as mine. Cass, a fellow southerner whose drawl from the interviewer’s chair combined with mine from across the set provided healthy balance to the British-to-mid-Atlantic phonics that typically crowd our Dixie quadrupthongs off the airwaves (unless a really stupid or really devious fictional character is needed for plot reasons).

Cass may have forgotten by now that at a certain point he opened my eyes to new artistic possibilities. He was, for the record, the first cartoonist in my orbit to educate himself about and then enthusiastically extol the merits of adding digital graphics to the ‘tooner’s toolbox.

Those examples told me more clearly than any lecture could have that my former misgivings were overdue for reevaluation.

At left: A cartoon by the Cass-man himself.